Tatoeba is a project that aims to collect lots of sentences translated in several languages. In this blog you will find, among other things, news and documentation about it.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Tatoeba update (Mar 6th, 2010)

Ah, finally an update that will be integrating "real" changes. Here's a short description of the new stuff.

Possibility to indicate the language

Until now, when you wanted to add a sentence or a translation, you had no way to indicate in which language you were contributing. The language was auto-detected though, but it was still a bit puzzling the first time you try to add something. Most people were probably thinking "But how will they know what language... oh okay, it's auto-detected". But more importantly, we could not really consider supporting languages that are not supported by Google's language detection tool (which we are using). Users would have to indicate manually the correct language everytime, and that would be annoying.

This is a small but important feature we wanted to have in Tatoeba for a long time and it's finally here.

Adopting in place

There's one important concept in Tatoeba: you can only modify a sentence if you are the "parent" (owner) of that sentence. You are by default the parent of the sentences you add, which implies only YOU can modify your sentences (which makes sense). But you can also become the parent of a sentence by "adopting" it. Because many, many sentences in Tatoeba do not have any parent. The reason why you'd want to adopt a sentence is because you noticed a mistake and want to correct it, and you wouldn't be able to do this without being the parent of that sentence.

The adopt feature was quite "heavy" to use. Everytime, you were redirected to the "info" page of that sentence. Now it can all be done in one place. Click on the adopt icon, and there you go, no redirection, you can modify it right away. This should make the tasks of correcting sentences less annoying.

Only main sentence displayed when translating

This should solve a problem that we've had for a long time. Users who are not familiar with the system tend to add translations without caring what they actually add their translation to. Many times, people were adding a translation to a Japanese sentence when they were in fact translating from the English sentence. And because of the way things are displayed, they think "okay, I'm just adding one sentence in that box". But it's not the way things work in Tatoeba... Hopefully this will make things clearer.

Possibility to delete comments

Yes, now you can delete your comments (comments on sentences as well as comments on the wall). You cannot edit them yet though. That will be for next time (probably). Be careful though! Deleting a comment will delete it forever.We haven't made a page that lists all your comments yet, but you can go through all the comments in Tatoeba here.

What next

Well I'm looking at our todo list, and it's hard to say... I'd rather let it be a surprise ;)